Touring Israel A Window Into Jewish People’s Survival

An early tourist of the Holy Land, Mark Twain, wrote of the Jews:

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was. … All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Just recently, I was reminded of Twain’s words as I traveled Israel with the “Land and the Spirit” tour of the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute (JLI). Some 300 Jews from the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe and South America came to discover and experience the spirituality that is embedded in our land, a living holiness that inspires people today just as it has Jews of all the generation before us.

We stood in the City of David amidst the excavation of homes and fortresses that were already old when, thousands of years ago, the Babylonians invaded and conquered.

We stood in the remains of the synagogue on the Masada mountaintop, as our guide told us that prominent among the few scrolls that survived the first century C.E. Roman pillage was the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the bones. The prophet told of seeing dry, dead bones and asking G-d could these bones yet live? G-d assured him that he would say how they would.

In that moment, we all saw ourselves as a fulfillment of that prophecy: In us, the dry bones of the Jewish people had been restored to life once again.

Article continued (Chabad.org News)